The Conservation of Action

One of the big parts of SBRPG was it's Action Agility system, which cut up a player's turn into a ever-decreasing action-point (AP) countdown. I have always liked AP systems, as they create a system where the player needs to make a choice of "what's next?" ad judging if an action is worth the cost. SBRPG put parries on the AP system, requiring you to save for parries, or pre-spend parry AP if you lost initiative. As a result, everything mattered, from your speed, to the weapons you carried, to the actions you performed. Everything was a careful build and calculation to return payout for energy spent. Over a turn, the resource was AP; in the long term, hits and the cost incurred by powers were also resources to be spent.

Note the word resources here. Roleplaying games typically have strong resource management components, from survival games to dungeon games, the question becomes, "what do I give up to go a little farther?" and "what is the potential payout?" Some games reduce the resource tracking, such as D&D4, and shift it to managing your power list of encounter, daily, and at-will powers. Ironically, resource tracking in D&D4 became more onerous with all of the conditions in-play during combat, with a -2 to-hit condition for a monster linked to the applying character's turn, or being rolled off on a 50% chance per turn.

D&D4 had a system of move actions, standard actions, and free actions - which basically meant you could move once, use a power or attack, and do any number of minor "free" actions as you would like. In reality, this is like most roleplaying games, where your actions are the "one and one" pair of move/attack, and a couple other things considered freebies.

With an action point system, everything is tracked, from a punch, to reloading a clip, to aiming, and firing a pistol shot.Your actions during the turn change frequently, and the situation at-hand often dictates the action mix. For the next version of SBRPG, I would like to move away from the lowest-level of AP tracking, but still make deciding how you spend your turn's actions matter - especially from turn-to-turn. This is something the original SBRPG did not have, the concept of actions you don't take having an impact of future turns, or spending actions ahead of time to gain a future benefit.

With a cross-turn AP and resource management system, the risk of taking an action or not taking it all of a sudden has to take the entire encounter into account. You will need to judge lulls in the action, and when it is safe to take actions to rest or restore powers, then burst into action again, spending your abilities wisely until the next rest point. Similarly, you will need to take your party's resources into account, if a party member is in trouble, you need to spend resources to assist them, and cover for party members taking a breather.

This sort of action-oriented AP and resource system better reflects the movie-reality we shoot for in SBRPG, and also makes the game different from a traditional turn-by-turn RPG. Resources, risk-management, judging the encounter, and making a plan for how to survive and prevail are the goal of the action-system we are working on, and I think we have crafted a cool system that forces you to think across turns, and as a whole for the party's pool of powers, actions, and gear.

Again, the design is tailored to the end experience, and does not repeat other designs just because they worked in the past, or are familiar to players. You need to break out when you design, and think to the experience you want players to have, and then plan out how this will work, and how you get there.